


I'm Taking A Mental Picture Of You Now

by LayALioness



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - High School, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Fake/Pretend Relationship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-27
Updated: 2016-07-18
Packaged: 2018-07-18 13:45:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 15,531
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7317619
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LayALioness/pseuds/LayALioness
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“I need you to have sex with someone,” Lexa says, and Bellamy promptly chokes on absolutely nothing. She glares at him, which doesn’t seem totally fair. His reaction was a bit warranted.</p><p>“I’m sorry, what? I think I misheard you.”</p><p>“No you didn’t,” she sighs, but repeats herself anyway. “I need you to have sex with someone. As a favor.”</p><p>Bellamy stares at her for a moment, opening and closing his mouth without actually saying anything. “Are you seriously asking if you can rent me out, like some sort of hooker?” he asks, finally, and Lexa rolls her eyes.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> that is the sound of me screaming because i've started another wip

“High school is where dreams go to die,” Bellamy says, settling in beside Lexa. They’re the only juniors in class, because it’s technically for seniors, but he and Lexa are notorious overachievers. And anyway he’d heard they were reading Nathaniel Hawthorne for this class, and he was looking forward to writing hate-speeches about the Puritans.

“What happened this time?” Lexa sighs, because she’s been his best friend for several years now, and she knows he only gets this over dramatic when he’s having an existential crisis. Last time it was because he saw a freshman in the bathroom who was an entire foot taller than him. Lexa had to spend twenty minutes on her phone, reading statistics out loud to convince him he’s the average height for his age and weight.

“Miller talked me into joining chorus,” Bellamy says, slouching down in his seat a little. His voice is still kind of hoarse, and he hates everything. “Did you know I’m a baritone? Mr. Harris is making me sign up for the spring musical.”

Lexa raises a single immaculate brow. “Isn’t that happening next month?”

Bellamy fixes her with a glare. “Yes. Now do you understand why I’m panicking?”

“Not really,” she shrugs, impassive as ever, which he can’t even be mad about. Bellamy’s only ever seen Lexa cry once, and it was only because she got sand in her eyes on the playground. “You’ll be charmingly mediocre, as always, and everyone will forget about it after a week.”

“You always know just what to say,” Bellamy snarks, and someone shushes them, because it’s a class filled with seniors who have just recently realized that they can’t actually just do nothing all year if they want to graduate, so now they’re desperate to make up for lost time.

“Empathy is an art form,” Lexa agrees primly, and starts to take notes in the fancy binder she has. Bellamy’s note taking strategy is a little more relaxed, in that he sometimes scribbles down things he thinks are important, and then loses the scraps of paper at the bottom of his bag.

They’re introducing _The Scarlet Letter_ this week, which seems promising. Bellamy’s heard a lot of terrible things about migraine-inducing metaphors, and he’s excited to find out if the rumors are true.

Jasper shows up about fifteen minutes in, which isn’t actually unusual. Bellamy’s pretty sure Jasper’s never been on time to anything in his entire life. He even brags about being late to his own birth, which--well, Bellamy’s not about to dispute that.

“I had to wait for Monty,” Jasper always explains, usually tossing an arm around his best friend’s shoulder, to punctuate the point. “We were born within an hour of each other, you know!”  
Today he just ducks his head a little with his most apologetic smile. “Sorry, Ms. T! I had to do battle with my locker.”

Bellamy’s pretty sure he was just getting high in the handicapped bathroom down in the annex, but he keeps his mouth shut, and Ms. Tsing just sort of impatiently motions for Jasper to take his seat. Ms. Tsing is relatively new as far as teachers go, and was actually hired to teach ninth grade anatomy, but there was a situation involving some undead tree frogs, and she was relocated to the English department soon after. Bellamy’s not sure she ever got over it, if the fact that she constantly glares at her Literature textbook is any indication.

Jasper slithers into the empty chair beside Bellamy, and shoots him a lazy grin. He’s definitely high. “Hey, are you guys going to Roma’s party tomorrow night?”

Jasper is a sophomore, and Bellamy still isn’t really sure how he ended up in a twelfth grade English class; either Jasper’s secretly an academic prodigy, or the school just had nowhere else to put him. Really either one could be true.

“Why would we?” Lexa asks coolly. She likes to keep up some sort of aloof facade, but Bellamy knows she secretly likes the spiked Hawaiian punch that Roma always sets out in a big Polish pottery vase on the table. Bellamy usually stops by because when he isn’t studying or watching documentaries on his 3DS he actually has pretty good game, and he usually drags Lexa along because if he didn’t she’d probably never leave her house.

“Uh, because it’ll be awesome? We’re gonna try skating off the roof on a mattress,” Jasper says. Bellamy’s pretty sure the school just had nowhere else to put him.

“We’ll probably make an appearance,” Bellamy shrugs, placating, and Jasper reaches over to bump his fist, where it rests on his textbook.

“Happy Earth Day,” he nods. Bellamy glances over at Lexa, confused.

“What?”

Jasper blinks at him. “What?”

“You said ‘Happy Earth Day,’” he says slowly, and Jasper gives a slow-spreading grin.

“Thanks, man. You too.” Then he lays his head down on his pile of notebooks, and starts to snore.

“Good lord,” Lexa says. Up near the chalk board, Ms. Tsing sighs and reaches for the spray bottle she fills with water from the bathroom sink, and aims it at Jasper. She likes to treat them all like misbehaving cats, clawing at her curtains. It seems to be the only thing that makes her happy.

A few sprays land on Bellamy, like some fucked up high school baptism. They’re on the fourteenth page of the book, and it’s still describing some rose, which just so happens to be a not-very-subtle metaphor for Hester.

“I’m going to die,” he declares, and Lexa reaches over to pat his hair a little, her best attempt at comfort.

“Yes,” she agrees.

The thing is, Bellamy knows that by all rights, he should be popular. And he sort of is, in that everyone knows him, at least peripherally, and most of them acknowledge him when they walk by. He never lacks a seat in the cafeteria, or the courtyard outside, when the weather’s nice and the administrators are feeling particularly forgiving.

Bellamy isn’t bad looking, and he’s smart but not overbearingly so, like some people (see: Lexa). He can dress himself pretty well, even if most of his clothes are from thrift stores, and he’s in pretty good shape from the weight training class he took with Lincoln last year. He may only have a handful of friends, but he has dozens of acquaintances, and in high school, those work sort of like currency. It’s like the prison system, except instead of cigarettes and discrete blowjobs, it’s phone numbers and Facebook friends.

But the fact that he has to be home in order to pick his little sister up from the bus stop, and then help her with her homework and just generally look after her while their mom works overtime again has always prevented him from joining things like after school clubs or sport teams or the school band, and actually making a name for himself at his school.

Which is fine. Bellamy would choose hanging out with his sister over a bunch of sixteen year old’s anyway, which in retrospect might be another reason why he’s not on anyone’s list for Homecoming King.

“Don’t be stupid,” Lexa says when he mentions it. “You’re very popular. You have good hair.” Bellamy isn’t really sure what the correlation is, between good hair and reputation, but it makes him laugh anyway. Lexa’s view of popularity is skewed--she thinks she’s popular, when really everyone’s just sort of intimidated by and attracted to her in equal measure. Zoe Monroe, one of the freshmen, asked if she could borrow a pencil once, and Lexa just glared at her until she apologized and ran off.

“What’d you do that for?” Bellamy asked, after, and Lexa just shrugged.

“She did not come prepared,” she explained. “She should feel ashamed of herself.”

“I think you just made her cry.”

“Maybe next time she’ll remember to bring a pencil.”

“You know they call you _Commander_ behind your back,” Bellamy mentions, after class. They’re on their way to biology, but they’re taking the long route because they both hate biology and keep hoping that some miraculous fire drill or earthquake might happen, and get them out of going.

Lexa perks up. “They do?”

“That’s not a _compliment_ ,” he says, exasperated, but it’s no use. Lexa’s positively preening.

They cut through the annex, which is really just a fancy word for the staircase that nobody uses because a teacher killed himself there in the late nineties, when Bellamy was four years old. Well, some people use it, like the potheads who smoke there during third period, and some less superstitious kids who use it as a shortcut to class. Last year during the cheerleader tryouts, they dared a bunch of the new girls to hold a seance there with one of those glow-in-the-dark Ouija hoards from Target.

And now, it’s where Ontari and her group of airhead followers finds them. They’re propped up against the wall, the image of trying too hard. They’re actually vaping--the steam smells like blueberry pie.

“Well if it isn’t the dyke and her bellhop,” Ontari sneers, and Bellamy makes a point to roll his eyes so hard it hurts. He’s not sure why they took to calling him bellhop, but it’s the worst attempt at an insult that he’s ever heard, and he was called “monkey-bread” as a kid once.

“Ice bitch,” Lexa greets, which isn’t much better, but. She’s trying, at least.

“Maybe you want to watch your lesbo mouth,” snaps Graham, Ontari’s obedient lackey. She has actual lackeys, like some Disney villain.

“Maybe you should watch yours,” Bellamy says, at the same time Lexa says “Your mother wasn’t complaining about my mouth, last night.” They bump fists as Graham flusters.

His next response is to shove his way into their personal space, as meatheads like Graham are wont to do. He moves towards Bellamy first. “Shit, maybe you want to watch my mouth for me. You’re probably a homo too.”

Bellamy considers not doing anything, just for a moment. “Maybe I am,” he agrees, and hits Graham in the jaw.

All in all, it’s not a bad way to get detention.

“Wait, is it true?” Miller finds him after class, once Bellamy’s gotten his pink slip from Vice Principal Kane, who’s in charge of things like that. Principal Jaha just sort of says the morning announcements and probably takes care of a bunch of monetary stuff. Kane’s the one they have to see for disciplinary issues.

“Is what true?” Bellamy asks, clenching and unclenching his fist. It’s still sore, and the first two knuckles are starting to bruise.

“That you called Graham a homophobic cad and then punched him in the junk,” Miller says, because Miller’s the resident gossip. If there’s a rumor floating around their school at any given time, about any given thing, Miller knows about it.

“Who even says _homophobic cad_ ?” Bellamy muses, and then thinks better of it once he realizes Miller’s still in his getup for the AP Lit class’s rendition of _Beowulf_ . He pokes at the crown of laurels until it sits crooked, and Miller slaps his hand away.

“So it isn’t true?”

Bellamy shrugs. “I did punch him in the face,” he admits, and Miller grins.

“Awesome. What a dickweed.”

“I got detention,” Bellamy sighs. “I need you to pick O up after school.”

“Yeah, alright,” Miller agrees, mostly because he just recently got his dad to split the cost of an ancient sedan, fifty-fifty. It’s a lemon, painted this ridiculous yellow color that reminds Bellamy of the vomit Jasper threw up after trying to make skittles-flavored schnapps. But it’s a running car and Miller got his license over the summer. “Why can’t Lexa do it?”

“She got detention too.”

“Lexa got detention,” Miller says, disbelieving. “I thought she was basically untouchable.”

Bellamy gives half a shrug. While it’s true that, as the granddaughter of a very rich couple of blue bloods, who recently donated a check that paid for the school’s new library, Lexa very rarely, if ever, has to suffer any consequences--it’s sort of hard to ignore her trying to kick Ontari over the stair railing, mobster-style. Honestly, she’s probably lucky she didn’t get expelled.

“I can’t believe I wasn’t there for this,” Miller sighs. “I’ve been waiting to see Graham get his ass kicked since the fourth grade.”

“You didn’t really miss much,” Bellamy swears. “He talked shit to Lexa, I hit him, Lexa tried to kill Ontari, and then Mr. Horowitz broke it up.”

“Still,” Miller says, and then rolls his eyes as Lexa steps up on Bellamy’s other side.

“Still what?” she asks.

“Someone told Miller I punched Graham in the junk.”

“If Jim hadn’t stopped the fight, maybe you would have,” Lexa says, because she’s on a first-name basis with pretty much the whole faculty. It’s one of the weirder things about her.  
Miller makes another face, and then gives some half-baked excuse before turning down a different hall. Miller and Lexa have never liked each other, which Bellamy’s never really understood. They’re both gay, in a fairly non-homosexual area; it seems like they’d have a lot to talk about. The evils of compulsory heterosexuality, and shit.

“Is your detention for this afternoon too?” he asks, and Lexa holds up her matching pink slip, in answer.

“I’m rather looking forward to it,” she admits. “I’ve never had detention, before.”

“Yeah, maybe we’ll get high in the bookshelves and have a dance number,” Bellamy jokes, but the joke’s lost on her, because she’s never seen The Breakfast Club. “We seriously need to beef up your movie list,” he sighs.

Lexa wrinkles her nose at the thought. “I have seen all the films that matter.”

“You haven’t even seen Harry Potter! There are some things I just can’t let slide.”

Lexa shushes him with a hiss, which can only mean one thing. He follows her gaze down the hall and tries to swallow a laugh. Clarke Griffin is across the way, half-dressed in her mascot uniform, chatting to Monty near the lockers.

“She’s like fifteen feet away,” he teases, and Lexa glares.

“Don’t act like if she looked at you now, you wouldn’t have to suddenly ‘go to the bathroom,’” she punctuates the thought with a vicious pair of air quotes.

Bellamy rolls his eyes. “Don’t confuse me with yourself. I’ve known Clarke since we were like eight years old. Just because she’s hot now, doesn’t mean I can’t even make normal conversation.”

Almost as if the universe decides to test him, that’s the moment Clarke chooses to remember he exists.

“Hey, Bellamy,” she chirps with a sunny smile. She’s always smiling sunnily these days. Bellamy’s not sure what happened to the tiny blonde with the permanent scowl, but he’s pretty sure she’s taking her role as school mascot a little too seriously. “Lexa,” she adds, turning her smile towards her. Bellamy has to try not to grin, when his best friend nods stoically. She’s probably crying on the inside. Lexa is the worst when it comes to crushes. When they were in eighth grade, and she had a thing for some girl named Anya, she just laid on his bedroom floor for two hours because she turned her down to the spring dance.

“Wow, way to shatter the illusion,” Bellamy says, nodding to the head piece of Clarke’s costume, the space helmet. The Ark Astronauts used to be the Ark Sky Devils, which involved Clarke wearing a considerably more revealing two-piece, with her whole torso painted a midnight blue. The pep rallies were amazing.

But as usual, Lexa’s grandparents decided to ruin things for everyone, by protesting the _devils_ part of Sky Devils. So now their mascot is much more G-rated and a lot less awesome.

“Yeah, gravity’s a real bummer,” Clarke agrees, and it’s a shitty joke but it makes him laugh anyway, like when they were kids and were the only ones who really understood each other’s humor.  
But then Clarke went through puberty and got a lot more friends, while Bellamy just sort of stayed the same, and he can’t remember the last time he actually hung out with Clarke, but he’s pretty sure it was before she grew cleavage.

He met Lexa in middle school, and they mostly only became friends because neither of them really had that many, and they both actually cared about grades.

“You guys coming to the game?” Clarke asks.

“Can’t,” Bellamy holds up their matching slips. “Detention. Go Astronauts, though.”

“I bet you don’t even know which sport’s playing,” Clarke smirks.

“Uh, something with ball in the name.”

She shakes her head. “Soccer.”

“That’s called football by the rest of the world, so I think I’m still right,” Bellamy points out, and she laughs.

“Maybe. See you guys when you get out of jail. Stay awesome!” Then she sort of just, hops away.

Lexa slaps him in the chest with her binder. “I can’t believe you just did that!” she hisses, marching off.

“Did what?” Bellamy rubs at his shoulder, where the binder hit hardest. He has to jog a little, to catch up to her. “We were just making small talk. Lexa? Did what?”

After-school detention is pretty much exactly how Bellamy pictured it. He has to use Lexa’s cell phone, to call his mom at her job and let her know Miller will pick up Octavia in his stead, and then Mr. Wallace confiscates everyone’s phones, and chemistry goggles, in Monty’s case, and then puts his feet up on the desk and takes a nap. He makes it very clear that they aren’t to do anything other than sit in their seats silently, contemplating the wrong choices that have led to this moment. For most of them, that means falling asleep on their desks.

“What’d you even do to get in here?” Bellamy asks Monty, who as far as he knows, has never done anything worse than underage drinking. Which, okay, sounds pretty bad, but it’s not like he does a bunch of keg-stands. Mostly he just experiments with weird imported vodka and then waxes poetic about the moon.

“Raiding the chemistry cache,” he admits. “Jasper and I wanted to try making rock candy shots.”

“You guys are like Myth Busters but with alcohol,” Bellamy decides. Monty looks like he agrees.

After the first bathroom break, Mr. Wallace seems to decide that sitting and staring off into space isn’t punishment enough, so he gets some tools from the wood shop teacher, and makes them scrape old gum off the undersides of the desks.

Bellamy glances over across the room where Lexa is. He’s pretty sure she’s plotting, and saving the gum for some sort of revenge against Mr. Wallace, and maybe even Mr. Kane. She’ll probably leave them in a burning bag on the front porch or something.

Detention doesn’t actually last all that long, and it’s still mid-afternoon when Bellamy finally walks out the front door. “You’re giving me a ride home, right?” he asks Lexa. “I mean, it is sort of your fault I got detention in the first place.”

Lexa scoffs. “You decided to hit Graham instead of just battling him with your wits. How exactly is that my fault?”

“I was defending your honor,” Bellamy explains. “Plus, I didn’t see any wits-battling going on while you dangled Ontari over the railing like a mobster.”

Lexa’s car is the nicest in the parking lot, probably in the whole tri-state area, except for maybe her grandfather’s Rolls Royce. Lexa’s ride is a Mercedes, gun-metal silver, fast and round like a bullet. It was a gift for her fifteenth birthday, back when she didn’t even have her permit yet. It took her three tries to get her license, last year, because she kept speeding, and blowing past yield signs.

“I thought they meant everyone else must yield to me,” she just shrugged, when Bellamy asked about it.

Bellamy slides into the front seat as Lexa turns on the engine, and Bach kicks on so deafeningly that Bellamy cringes. Lexa listens to classical music the way most people listen to death metal. She knows the drive to his house by heart, because to be honest they spend most of their time there, even though Lexa’s veritable mansion is nicer in every way. But all of O’s stuff is at his house, and he knows Lexa doesn’t really like going home, if she can help it. He knows it’s because of her grandparents, and how they like to loom over her, reminding her of all the important things she’s supposed to do with her life, regardless of whether she wants to or not. And he knows it’s because the inside of her house looks like one of those manicured homes for sale over on Northam Court, with perfectly placed furniture and little cheese plates out for the open houses that Bellamy sometimes raids if he’s feeling hungry and bored. They’re pretty, magazine-ready, but they aren’t warm. They aren’t lived-in.

Miller’s shitty car is parked in the drive when they pull up, and Bellamy can practically hear Lexa starting to simmer behind the wheel. He’s still not really sure why Lexa doesn’t get along with--well, everyone. He knows it stems from something in elementary school, but he and Clarke didn’t go to the same school as the others. They lived on the opposite side of the county, along with Raven and Wells. But Ark City only has one middle and one high school, so they were all consolidated after fifth grade.

“O? Miller?” Bellamy calls, walking in the front door and nearly tripping over all the pairs of shoes piled in front of it. He kicks them off to the side with a huff.

“They’re in the backyard,” Bryan says, mouth half-stuffed with what looks like a corn dog dipped in one of those jars of queso meant for tortilla chips. He’s probably trying to move up a class for wrestling, or something. Bryan, from what Bellamy’s noticed, is either always eating something, or trying not to even look at food.

“Thanks man.” Bellamy heads out to find them, dropping his bag off along the way. Lexa stays behind to chat with Bryan about some classes they share. Lexa and Bryan are cordial enough, but that doesn’t really mean much; Bryan’s friendly with everyone.

Miller and Octavia are outside, as promised. Miller’s still wearing his makeshift toga over his jeans, but he’s moved his laurel wreath onto Octavia’s hair, and they’ve made her a toga too, out of what looks like Bellamy’s bedsheets.

“Nice costume,” he says, tugging at it as he sits down. Octavia’s holding some sort of booklet in her hands, sitting cross-legged across from Miller on the grass. It’s nearing summer in California, so the yard is going patchy in places, like it’s balding. Bellamy looks around, checking for ants.

“It’s a _peplos_ ,” O says primly. Bellamy flicks her hair.

“I know, I’m the one who taught you that word,” he teases.

“We can make one for you too.”

“Maybe later.” He nods to the booklet. “What are you guys doing?”

“She’s helping me run lines,” Miller says. “For the play.” He fixes Bellamy with a serious stare. “You should probably work on yours, too. Do you even know who you’re playing?”

“I don’t even know which play it is,” Bellamy admits, and Miller heaves a sigh that’s too big for his body. For all that Miller pretends to be gruff, and athletic--well, okay, he is pretty gruff and athletic--Bellamy’s fairly positive he’s going to end up on Broadway some day. Or maybe in some off-Broadway rendition of Hamlet. Either way, he’ll be giving a soliloquy to a skull in his future.

“Is the Red Queen here?” Miller asks. He means Lexa, but Bellamy’s never really understood the nickname, either. Maybe she brought a guillotine in to show and tell once, or something.

“Yeah, she’s talking to Bryan.”

Miller grumbles something about his boyfriend’s allegiance, and then stands, brushing the grass stains off of his bedroom curtain toga. “We should head out, before he eats everything in your fridge. Next week is weigh-in.”

Bellamy walks them both out, and promises to go over his lines that night, even though he’s not actually sure where he put them.

“Did you do your homework?” he asks O, once the boys are gone. At eleven, she likes to pretend she doesn’t have any homework, and then come parent-teacher conferences, they all find out she’s failing each class, and Bellamy’s the one that gets in trouble.

“That depends on how you define do,” she says carefully, and Bellamy steers her towards the small kitchen table. It’s covered in splotchy green paint, from two years ago when he and O found a mostly-empty can of it in the shed, and decided the table looked too boring. Their mom didn’t even notice for three weeks.

“Get to it.”

“What’s detention like?” she asks, pulling out her Lisa Frank folders. “I want to get detention.”

“It was horrible,” Bellamy sighs, sitting down across from her. He still has to turn to the side, so he can stretch his legs out. “They took us all out to the football field, and made us fight in hand-to-hand combat. Only the last survivor was allowed to leave.”

Octavia’s eyes went wide. “Like _The Hunger Games_.”

“ _Exactly_ like _The Hunger Games_ ,” Bellamy agrees.

She looks suspicious. “But then how did you and Lexa get away?”

“We revolted,” Bellamy shrugs. “Tied the principal up to the flag pole, upside down and in his underwear.”

Octavia nods professionally. “Good. Do you think I’ll ever get detention?”

“Only when you’re older, and they try to make you follow the dress code.”

“What’s the dress code?”

“A way for teachers to punish girls for the way that boys look at them.”

Octavia makes her best warrior face. “I’ll kill any boys that look at me,” she declares.

“You’ve been spending way too much time with Lexa,” Bellamy accuses, and Lexa smirks from where she stands in the doorway.

“You should be thanking me,” she says. Bellamy takes O’s worksheet so he can check her math.

Bellamy helps Octavia with the rest of her homework before letting her use his 3DS to check on her Neopets, while he and Lexa go up to his room. The Blake house is, in the simplest of terms, a shithole. The foundation is all but crumbled away, most of the baseboards have been eaten through by termites and other things his mom can’t afford to get exterminated, they have a roach problem every winter, and the upstairs plumbing almost never actually works.

But he has his own bedroom, and he pried open his painted-shut window so now sometimes he can crawl out and lay up on the roof at night, which is cool.

Lexa perches uneasily at the foot of his bed. She always acts like his room is filled with herpes, and she shouldn’t touch anything. Bellamy just rolls his eyes, and flops down beside her.  
He nudges her with his foot. “What’s wrong with you? Usually this is when you start glaring at me disdainfully, and judging all my shit.”

“I’m still judging all your shit,” she says, but she’s playing with the silver ring on her finger, which she only does when she’s nervous. It’s a promise ring, one of those super expensive Christian ones, from her grandmother. It’s sort of a joke by now--Lexa told Bellamy about her first time, back when they were sophomores. It was at Jesus Camp, of all places, with a pretty girl from Arizona, named Costia.

Lexa glances over at his wrist, at the fraying threaded bracelet that sits there. It’s from when Lexa went through a friendship bracelet phase, which means Bellamy has approximately twelve other ones laying around his room, because she didn’t have anyone else to give them to.

“Seriously, what’s up?” he nudges her again, and she slaps his foot away.

“Nothing, I just--feel a little off, that’s all.” He looks unconvinced, so she adds “I think it’s just close to that time of the month, or something.”

“O-kay,” Bellamy drawls, letting it drop. “You know you can tell me when you’re upset about something, right?” He lifts up his arm, flashing the bracelet. “I have like thirteen of these to prove it.”

Lexa smiles, like he knew she would. Sometimes she just has to be reminded that she isn’t totally alone in the universe. “I know,” she assures him.

Once Lexa leaves, Bellamy makes dinner for himself and Octavia. They don’t have much--and by much, he means really anything--but he does manage to find what’s left of some ground beef hiding in the freezer, and some shredded cheddar that hasn’t gone moldy yet, along with those little single-serving bags of Frito’s, so he makes them walking tacos.

It’s probably pretty shitty, that Bellamy’s the one who has to help his sister with her homework and wake up in the morning and make sure she gets to and from school, since they don’t live in the busing zone. He’s the one who does the cooking, the laundry, and the dishes, and tries to make sure their squalor is at least not suffocating. That they usually spend dinner making bets over how late their mom will get home, and whether or not she’ll watch some paid-per-view before passing out on the sofa.

But Bellamy’s never really been in the business of feeling sorry for himself, and this kind of life is really all he’s ever known. He’s not sure he’d know what to do if he suddenly woke up and lived in a house like Lexa’s, and didn’t have to worry about stuffing his bag with the free fruit from the cafeteria at school, or stealing a bunch of those packets of honey from KFC, because they can’t afford extra stuff like that at the grocery store. He’d probably still wake up at six in the morning and go knock on Octavia’s door, just because he’s so used to it.

Bellamy doesn’t end up finding his booklet for the play, but he does at least look up which play it is, on the school website. The Crucible, which seems ironic. Between English and the drama club, he’s going to be smothered by Puritans this year.

“I think I’m playing John Proctor,” he tells Lexa that morning, at lunch. She slides him two Granny Smith’s, which he puts into his bag. He’ll have to swing by the bathroom later and steal a few rolls of toilet paper, because they’re running low at home and he’s not sure his mom has even noticed.

 

“I need you to have sex with someone,” Lexa says, and Bellamy promptly chokes on absolutely nothing. She glares at him, which doesn’t seem totally fair. His reaction was a bit warranted.

“I’m sorry, what? I think I misheard you.”

“No you didn’t,” she sighs, but repeats herself anyway. “I need you to have sex with someone. As a favor.”

Bellamy stares at her for a moment, opening and closing his mouth without actually saying anything. “Are you seriously asking if you can rent me out, like some sort of hooker?” he asks, finally, and Lexa rolls her eyes.

“Oh, don't be so dramatic. We both know you aren't exactly tight-belted." 

Bellamy huffs, affronted. "That doesn't mean I'll just give out to anyone, on a  _ favor _ . Who even is it?"

"A cousin," she says. "From France. You don't know her."

His immediate thought is to call bullshit, but if anyone has a mysterious cousin from France, it's Lexa. "Why do you need me to have sex with them?"

"I lost a bet."

As far as excuses go, it's a pretty shoddy one, and he levels her with a heavy stare. Lexa just shrugs. "What kind of  _ bet _ means that I have to have sex with your French cousin?"

"The kind that we made, and I lost. It involves a sex recording."

"A  _ what _ recording? Like Kim Kardashian?" The story is just getting weirder and with each passing moment, Bellamy's becoming convinced he's asleep, or maybe he's still in chemistry and is hallucinating this conversation, getting high off the fumes.

"No, no video. Just sound," Lexa says, and if it was possible for an animated lightbulb to magically appear above Bellamy's head signifying a Bright Idea, one would.

"So, what you're saying is, it just has to  _ sound _ like we're having sex," he says, slow, and Lexa's eyes narrow.

"What are you talking about?"

Bellamy catches sight of Roma, sitting with the rest of the volleyball team across the room. “What if it happened in front of a bunch of people?” he asks, and Lexa frowns. “Tons of witnesses, who think they’re hearing your weird cousin and me hooking up.”

Lexa follows his line of sight and nods, pieces clicking together. “The party tonight?”

“Yeah. We’ll show up together, ask if there’s a room we can use to talk, and then make a bunch of animal noises while everyone’s standing outside, eavesdropping. Then you're out of debt with your cousin, and I don't have to sell out my dignity.”

Lexa snorts. " _ What _ dignity?" She cuts him off before he can respond. "That actually sounds plausible. We'll pick you up at nine."

The biggest hassle of the plan, is finding a babysitter for Octavia. Bellamy usually just hires Maya, who lives next door, but she apologetically tells him she’s going to the party too, as Jasper’s date. And as it turns out, pretty much everyone else he knows is going, and apparently twenty bucks and a couple of his mom’s gross Pina Colada mixes isn’t worth spending their night looking over an eleven year old.

In the end, he bribes Bryan with a bag of discount pizza rolls, and agrees to let him bring Miller over.

Lexa picks him up in her Mercedes, looking dangerous in a silver sequin dress, with jagged eyeliner around her eyes like warpaint. Her cousin is sitting in the front seat, also looking dangerous, but in a dress that looks like a bunch of pennies stitched together. She eyes Bellamy up and down, bangs thick and falling in her eyes.

"He'll do," she says, and he gives a smile wide with fake cheer. Lexa makes a face at him in the rear view mirror as he crawls into the backseat, curling his limbs up at uncomfortable angles because Lexa's tiny bullet car is really only built for two.

Tonight’s music is that victory anthem from  _ Chariots of Fire _ , which Bellamy finds strangely applicable. Then they pull up the winding drive to the house party and  _ Shake That Ass _ playing on the loud speakers.

Bellamy finds Roma easily enough; she’s usually out by the pool. He’s not sure if she actively waits for him to arrive, so they can hook up in her bedroom, or if that just always ends up happening on its own.

She beams up at him, eyes already a little glassy. “Bellamy Blake,” she says, playing coy and reaching up to play with the strings of her bikini top.

The thing is, Bellamy might actually like Roma, if he ever spoke to her outside of the context of a one night stand.

Bellamy has his arm around The Cousin's shoulders, and then suddenly realizes he probably shouldn't refer to her as just The Cousin all night. He leans in, mouth brushing her hair. It tastes like the heavy duty kind of hairspray O used to use for her dance recitals. "I don't know your name," he whispers, and hopes it just looks like he's saying something romantic. 

The Cousin giggles, because apparently she's an actress too. "Madeleine," she says, and reaches a finger up to  _ boop _ his nose, which is only the second most surreal thing about this situation.

“Hey, Roma.  _ Madeleine  _ and I were wondering if you had a room available? We sort of need to-- _ talk _ .” He tries to lay it on as thick as possible, but apparently that wasn’t necessary. Madeleine's practically stuck to his side like a wet towel.

Roma frowns, clearly understanding. “Um, sure, I guess so. You know where the guest room is, upstairs?”

Bellamy gives his brightest grin. “Sure do, thanks.” He turns to lead Madeleine away. “Come on, babe.” She giggles into his side. It’s unnerving; Lexa doesn’t giggle, so he feels like none of her relatives should either. Like they just shouldn't have that gene.

They gather a pretty big crowd along the way, both because they’re clearly doing the we’re about to hook up march, and because nobody has ever seen Madeleine before, so they're intrigued. “Animal noises time,” he whispers, feeling suddenly uncertain. He hopes Lexa let her in on this part of the plan; it'd be so awkward if she started trying to take off her dress, right now. But Madeleine just rolls her eyes and lets out a high-pitched moan.

“What the fuck was that?” Bellamy hisses.

“What?” She says, nonchalant. “You want them to think I’m enjoying myself, don’t you? I’m helping your reputation.”

“Yeah, I’ve hooked up like seven times in this house,” Bellamy smirks. “I think my reputation’s set by now.” Madeleine just rolls her eyes and gives a second, more drawn-out moan. “Have you had fake sex before? You’re impossibly good at this.” It feels strange, having a weird sort-of banter with this girl he's just met, but he supposes having fake sex does sort of bond two people. He grunts a little, just so she isn’t doing all the work.

“Maybe all the orgasms you’ve heard have just been fake,” Madeleine shrugs, the picture of innocence, and Bellamy now sees the resemblance to his best friend.

“Shut up.”

They keep it going for roughly twenty minutes, because they’re both a little too proud to give up any earlier than that, and then they mess up each other’s hair and clothes, for good measure.

“Ready to do the walk of straight shame?” Bellamy asks her, and he means it as a joke, but he’s still a little worried that she might regret it, or maybe already does.

"That was fun. We should do it again, sometime.” She winks, unlocks the door, and steps out as the crowd of eavesdroppers immediately disperse, trying to act like they weren’t listening in on them.

Bellamy sees her get a few high-fives from some girls he recognizes, which seems like a good sign. He’s heard about girls being basically persecuted Hester Prynne-style for having sex, so he’s glad that apparently won’t be the case.

He’s barely walked down the hall when Dax finds him. “Dude, did you really just have a threesome with two college chicks?”

Bellamy squints at him, a little. “Honestly, how could someone fuck up the news in twelve seconds?”

Someone calls his name from a few feet away, and Bellamy turns to find Clarke Griffin standing at the top of the stairs, solo cup in hand.

Dax all but forgotten, Bellamy crosses over to meet her there. “Please tell me you didn’t get that from the wonder twins downstairs.”

Clarke grins. “If you mean Monty and Jasper, our resident mixologists, then yes, I did. But I also grabbed a second cup, so you can suffer with me.” She passes it over, and Bellamy takes a sip, which he regrets instantly.

“I guess they figured out the skittles recipe,” Clarke muses, smacking her lips. She’s wearing a dress, and Bellamy knew she was hot, has known it since freshman year, but Clarke usually dresses a lot more Farmer’s Market-casual, in paint-stained jean capris, and henley’s. Honestly Bellamy’s doing his best to not look down, because he doesn’t want to feel like the kind of creep that talks to her chest and not her face, or whatever.

But then she crosses her arms and pops out her hip, smiling up at him, and she’s making this incredibly difficult.

“We should catch up,” she declares, wobbling a little even though she’s wearing flats, and Bellamy hopes she isn’t too drunk. Maybe he should get her some water, just in case, or one of those puff pastries he saw in the kitchen.

“Yeah, we should,” he agrees, gently moving her towards the stairs, keeping an arm on her shoulder in case she trips going down them. “Come on, let’s go catch up in the kitchen.”

“Let’s go _ketchup_ in the kitchen,” Clarke says, and then snorts at her own stupid pun.

Bellamy grins, and then has to steady her when she wobbles again, and nearly misses a step.

Roma’s kitchen is as massive as the rest of her house, with stainless steel appliances and granite counter tops and one of those sinks with the really big basins and no dish rack. He remembers sleeping over a few times, back in elementary school when the whole class was invited to everyone’s birthday parties, and all the boys had to sleep downstairs while the girls slept in Roma’s bedroom. Apparently not much has changed; they still have wine glasses dangling from an expensive magnet strip under the cupboards, and a box of toaster strudel in the freezer. Bellamy sets about heating them up, while Clarke heaves herself up on the counter.

“You haven’t changed,” Clarke says, as Bellamy hisses burning his fingertips, trying to pull the strudel from the toaster when they’re done. He glances over to find her watching him, looking happy and warm. He tells himself it’s the weird candy-flavored vodka.

“I’ve gotten taller,” he argues, zig-zagging the icing across the pastries before handing them over. “I can almost grow a mustache, now.”

Clarke laughs, reaching up to trace a finger over his smooth upper lip. “You haven’t changed,” she says again, decidedly. “You still take care of everyone.”

“Not everyone,” he grumbles, because he hasn’t actually spoken with Clarke Griffin since they were thirteen years old. It’s unfair that she still knows him like this. “You haven’t changed either.”

She tips her head back and laughs, spluttering bits of pastry all over the place. Bellamy reaches out to brush the crumbs off her chin. “I think a lot of people would disagree,” she says, motioning to her breasts, and Bellamy glances away.

“Yeah, but you’re still Clarke. You’re still always covered in paint and charcoal. You still tell stupid jokes. You don’t frown as much anymore, and you might have a six pack now, and,” he gestures at her torso in general, and she laughs. “But you’re still you.”

“You like my stupid jokes,” she says defensively, because of course that’s what she latched onto, and Bellamy shakes his head at her.

“You still argue about everything,” he says, pointed, and Clarke pokes him in the arm.

She hums, taking an enormous bite out of her toaster strudel. She speaks with her mouth full, spewing crumbs all over the place. “You still have freckles.”

“Amazingly, they don’t wash off in the bath,” he grins, and she shoves him.

“You’re still a massive dork,” she sticks her tongue out, with a bit of the apple filling still on it, and he makes a face. “I miss you,” she says, quieter, and Bellamy has to take a moment to put his thoughts in order, because honestly he’s missed her too. For all their hallway small talk, and quick hello’s in the library at school, it’s been years since he’s just _hung out_ with Clarke Griffin, and she used to be his closest friend.

“I’m right here,” he says, and she huffs a little.

“You know what I mean.” And there’s that frown that he remembers so clearly. The little wrinkle in between her brows.

“Yeah,” he agrees. “I know. I miss you too.”

That’s where Raven finds them, five minutes later, marching her way in with the determined look of a war general. She promptly ignores them, makes her way to the cupboard, grabs an enormous bottle of expensive-looking tequila, and looks ready to walk out again, when she finally notices she’s not alone.

She squints at the pair of them, back and forth for a few seconds, and then says “What are you two assholes doing?”

Raven and Bellamy had been the kind of friends who liked to boss each other around and tease each other endlessly, until eventually one of them went too far and actually hurt the other, so they’d spend the next day and a half not speaking before ultimately forgetting what they’d been fighting about in the first place.

Clarke and Wells had been the kind of friends where Clarke would figurehead each and every plan, while Wells just sort of went along with them. When the four of them met, the clash was extraordinary, but then the fire gave way to a strange sort of bond that meant they were inseparable for nearly six years.

And then Raven moved onto middle school a year ahead of the rest of them, and Wells ended up at some fancy boarding school for future diplomats, and Clarke went to a different junior high, and Bellamy met Lexa.

They all just sort of drifted apart, the way that friends do sometimes, and Bellamy knows it’s no one’s fault, but if anything that just makes it harder. Everything’s easier, when there’s someone to blame.

“Toaster strudel,” Bellamy says, raising his half-eaten pastry like a toast. “There’s more in the freezer, if you want one.”

“Harumph,” Raven says, which isn’t an actual response, he’s pretty sure. “I have to go wipe the floor with some nerds, at Mud Splash. Later, nerds.”

Bellamy watches her leave, in silence. “She hasn’t really changed all that much,” he decides, and Clarke grins beside him. “What exactly is a _Mud Splash_?”

“It’s like a Pineapple Splash, but with less rum and a wiffleball,” Clarke says, leaning against his shoulder, like she’s forgotten how to hold herself up. She smells like strawberries and cream, and he knows it’s probably her shampoo or something, but he can’t help thinking it fits her. “You used to be softer,” she grumbles, and he laughs, jostling her a little.

“Sorry I don’t make a good pillow anymore.”

“I didn’t say that,” Clarke argues, whining when he pulls her down from the counter. “I was comfortable there!”

Bellamy steers her by her shoulders, towards the door. “Imagine how much more comfortable you’ll be in your own bed.”

She hums a little, carrying more tune than she used to, when they were kids. He remembers her getting in trouble, in music class, because she couldn’t stay on the beat. “Bed would be nice,” she decides, and goes limp in his hands, letting him move her.

“Did you drive here with anyone?” It’ll be easier if she came alone, so he can just drive her home in her own car, without having to round up any rowdy sophomores or juniors, drunk on whatever weird liquor Monty and Jasper brought along.

“No,” Clarke sighs. “Just me.”

“Good,” Bellamy says as he steps outside, spotting her car almost immediately. It’s kind of hard to miss the hot pink punch bug at the end of the drive. He sees Lexa’s Mercedes isn’t where she’d parked it, and hopes she got home okay. He’s pretty sure she wasn’t drinking, but he’ll text her later, to make sure. After he drops off Clarke.

The drive is easier than he’s expecting; it probably helps that it’s so late, caught in that in between hour, when the sky’s just beginning to grow lighter at the edges, a few hours before dawn. He only sort of remembers the way to the Griffin’s house--he’s never actually driven there, and everything looks different from behind the wheel, compared to when he was a fourth grader carpooling in the backseat.

The house itself is how he remembers it, though. Big but inviting, somehow just as massive as Lexa’s, without seeming like it’ll swallow him up. He nudges Clarke awake from where she’s fallen asleep against the passenger side window, mouth open just a little, making tiny noises in her sleep.

“Clarke,” he whispers, and then a second time, a little louder. “Clarke.”

Clarke wrinkles her nose at him and blearily opens her eyes, lashes all stuck together with mascara, pink lip gloss more than a little smudged. She sees him, and she smiles, slow and sleepy and happy, and everything inside Bellamy starts to twist up.

“Hey,” he says, soft, brushing the messy curls out of her face. Clarke catches his wrist with both hands, holding him still.

“I like you, Bellamy Blake,” she says, the same way she might say the sky was blue, or that water is wet. Like she’s stating a fact, indisputable.

“I like you too, Clarke Griffin.”

She leans forward to smack a kiss to his cheek, leaving sticky pink lip prints on the skin there. “Goodnight, Bell.”

He waits until she’s inside and he sees an upstairs light flick on, before he gets out of the car. He leaves her keys inside and the doors unlocked, because in this kind of neighborhood, unless someone decides to reboot _The Bling Ring_ , robbery is all but nonexistent.

It’s a two-mile hike to Bellamy’s house, and he knows how to get there in a general sort of way. If he gets lost, he’s got google maps on his shitty phone, and about three minutes’ worth of data left. Bellamy takes a minute to steady his pulse, because _Clarke fucking Griffin just said she liked him and kissed him on the cheek_ , and starts walking as the street lights start to dim.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “What have you heard about my dick?” Bellamy asks, nudging Miller with his foot. Miller, for his part, looks impressively unconcerned about it.
> 
> “I heard you got the clap from girl named Rosalita,” he says, not even bothering to look up from where he’s doodling a dick, pretty lovingly. It’s got ivy vines all around it.
> 
> Bellamy makes a face. “Wow, people suck. Her name’s Rita, and she paid me twenty-five dollars in the form of an Applebee’s gift card, to say I hooked up with her.”
> 
> Miller shakes his head at his art penis. “Straight people are fucking weird.” Bellamy can’t help but agree.
> 
> The thing is--it just keeps happening.

Bellamy almost kissed Clarke Griffin the summer before he turned thirteen.

They were at a party, the seventh grade kind where everyone thought they were badass for staying up past midnight, and googling porn. There was a game of spin the bottle, except some of the other kids wanted to change up the rules, so that whoever a person’s spin landed on, had to spend seven minutes in a room together. Bellamy’s first spin landed on Murphy, and they spent the time playing _scorpion_. And then Clarke’s spin landed on him.

The thing is, Bellamy hadn’t realized he had a crush on Clarke Griffin until he was faced with the option of kissing her, sitting across from each other, legs crossed, on top of their classmate’s bed.

Clarke didn’t say anything at first. She wouldn’t even look at him, and for a moment Bellamy wondered if she was nervous--but she was the most popular girl at their school. Surely she’d kissed _someone_ before.

“I might be wrong, but I’m pretty sure this is when we press our faces together and I embarrass myself,” Bellamy said, trying to make a joke out of it, and Clarke smiled down at her lap. It’d been a while since he’d seen her outside of school; they didn’t share any classes together, and she’d joined the track team, and the debate club, and had a whole host of new, older and more interesting friends. He missed her.

“Would it be okay if, instead of kissing, we just...didn’t?” Clarke asked, and Bellamy swallowed back the first bit of disappointment, because even if she didn’t spend her weekends at his house anymore, even if they no longer made up detective stories about crime-solving dogs together, she was still his friend.

“Yeah, of course.”

Clarke’s relief was palpable, which only made Bellamy feel bad for being disappointed at all. “Thanks. I’ll tell everyone you’re a good kisser,” she offered.

“You don’t have to,” Bellamy tried, but then the seven minutes were up, and Clarke was acting sly around him for the rest of the night, really doing her best to sell the story.

It helped him get his actual first kiss, just a few days later, with a girl named Gina behind the gym, and it was nice. He still sort of embarrassed himself, unsure what to do with his tongue, or where to put his hands. But Gina was warm and she smelled like some sort of berry.

He told Lexa about it later and she made a face. “Amateur,” she said, which he didn’t think seemed fair, since he was pretty sure she’d never even kissed anybody.

But Bellamy kept thinking back to that moment with Clarke on the bed, and he kept wishing he’d done something different. Not--he wouldn’t have kissed her if she didn’t want him to, no matter what, but he might have spent that time talking with her, catching up, becoming friends again.

He still saw Clarke in the halls at school, still waved and said _hello_ whenever they passed each other, but she still had all of her clubs and teams and new friends, and he still had his kid sister and Lexa, and eventually he stopped really thinking about her at all. Time passed, they grew older and moved up grades and took harder classes. They got into high school and Clarke became the mascot-slash-Homecoming Queen, and Bellamy became _that guy that girls hook up with sometimes_.

Except now, laying on his back on the sagging rooftop of his house, Bellamy’s thinking about that moment again. What he could have done differently. Maybe he and Clarke would have been close again, through the rest of junior high. Maybe they would have gone to Homecoming together, as friends, or more than friends. Maybe she could have been his first kiss.

Lexa picks him up for school in the morning, just like usual, and she doesn’t seem to want to talk about his fake one night stand with her cousin the night before, but Bellamy can’t really help it.

“So am I fake dating your cousin now or what?” he blurts out at a red light, and Lexa swears as she hits the brakes too hard.

She turns a glare on him. “Why on earth would you do that?”

“I don’t know how far you need this to go, for your bet, or whatever.”

Lexa softens at that, and turns back to the road as she switches gears. She refuses to drive automatics, because she thinks they’re too easy, so her grandparents special-ordered her car from Germany.

"The bet has been paid, you're in the clear," she says. "Madeleine flew back to Paris this morning, once my grandparents got wind of her  _debauchery_ last night, and called a meeting with _our Father_."

“News travels freaky fast in this town,” Bellamy muses, settling back in his seat. 

Lexa hums agreeably as she pulls into the parking lot.

"So are you going to tell me what the bet was, or why your cousin needed some fake sex recording?"

"No," Lexa says, firm, and marches into the building without another word.

It doesn’t take long for Bellamy to learn that Lexa’s grandparents and God weren’t the only ones who knew about his tryst with Madeleine.

“How does _everybody know_?” he hisses when he finds Lexa already at their table, for lunch. "And what was it even  _for_?"

“Hmm?” Lexa pretends not to hear him over the Sylvia Plath book in her hands.

“John Mbege asked if I had an orgy with five Europeans,” Bellamy says, unamused. “It’s been less than twenty-four hours since the party, how is this even possible?”

Lexa is staying remarkably quiet about the whole thing, which seems oddly suspicious. Bellamy studies her for a minute, and then realizes that the book she’s pretending to read is actually upside down.

“What did you do,” he demands, and Lexa sighs.

“Madeleine  _may_ have sent everyone on the student network a recording of your rendezvous,” she says slowly, and Bellamy gapes.

“You did _what_ ? To-- _everyone_?”

“Just the ones on the student network,” she shrugs, like it isn’t a big deal. Which, to be fair, it isn’t. It’s not like the sex tape she leaked was _real_ or anything. It’s just a bunch of fake noises he made with some girl while trying not to laugh.

But, still. Bellamy fidgets a little uncomfortably. He doesn’t really like the thought of people listening to what they _think_ is him having sex. Even he doesn’t really know what he sounds like during sex--it’s not like that’s what he’s paying attention to. Usually he’s a bit preoccupied. What if he sounds ridiculous on the recording? What if someone sends the recording to his _mom_?

“It’s not like there’s any proof that it’s you,” Lexa assures him, like she’s just read his thoughts. “You weren’t screaming each other’s names, or anything.”

“That’s true,” he agrees, more to convince himself than anything. Then he glances back at her. "Wait,  _you_ listened to it?"

Lexa shrugs. "Madeleine played it on the way home. It sounded very authentic." Bellamy makes a face. Lexa starts packing up her bag, to leave for class. “Don’t overthink this,” she says sternly, because she knows that he will. Bellamy waves her off and then promptly begins to fret about everything.

That’s how Rita finds him.

Rita is the kind of person who, if they aren’t actively looking at her, everyone tends to forget about. She finds Bellamy in the library, pretending to study for his Chem exam even though really he’s still freaking out about the recording, albeit silently and on the inside. Bellamy’s pretty much mastered the art of containing his existential crises, so that no one ever knows he’s having one.

“Hey, Bellamy,” Rita says, sliding into the heavy wooden chair across from him. All the library furniture is heavy, Bellamy suspects in an attempt to keep students from moving them around. In junior high they used to play pranks on the teachers by rearranging all the flimsy desks and plastic chairs. Apparently Ark High School thought ahead.

“Hey Rita, what’s up?” Bellamy tries to think of the last time he and Rita had ever spoken to each other, but he comes up blank. He’s genuinely not sure they ever have.

But she looks anxious and serious, and it’s enough to sober him up a little. Finally, she says in a rushed whisper, “Madeleine told me.”

Bellamy frowns, confused. "How do you know Madeleine?"

"Everyone knows Madeleine," Rita says, even though it's clearly not true. Bellamy, for one, hadn't heard of her until the day before, so there's that. "Anyway, she told me about what she did."

“Yeah, well, it was good for me too,” he says, not at all convincing, and Rita shakes her head.

“No, she told me what _actually_ happened.”

Bellamy’s frown deepens. What was the point of faking a hook up, if she was just going to go spreading the truth around anyway?

“I was wondering if you could do it for me, too,” Rita admits, and Bellamy stares blankly back at her.

“Wait, what? You want me to fake having sex with you?” He might be dreaming. The moment certainly feels surreal enough.

But if it was a dream, wouldn’t he just be having real sex? The answer isn’t so clear-cut, though. His subconscious is an asshole.

Rita nods conspiratorially, like they’re plotting a prison break, and not some imaginary hook up. “You know someone sits on me at least once everyday?”

Bellamy waits for her to continue, and then realizes it apparently isn’t a rhetorical question. “Uh, no, I didn’t. I’m sorry?”

Rita shrugs. “I’m used to it. Used to being looked over, and forgotten, and treated like I’m not there. Like I’m invisible.”

Bellamy feels his chest squeeze, and he knows he’s a sucker. _Fuck Lexa_ , he thinks, because she's the reason he's in this position in the first place.  _She will owe me_ so  _big._

“Okay, I mean I’ll help you, but I really don’t see how us pretending to have sex might change anything?”

“You’re one of the most well-known guys at school,” Rita says, and it doesn’t escape Bellamy, how she said _well-known_ instead of _popular_. “Especially about, you know. You’ve gotten around.”

“I haven’t gotten around _that_ much,” Bellamy grumbles, affronted, and Rita affectionately pats his hand.

“It’s okay,” she tells him. “You’re a boy. No one thinks badly of you for it. And all the girls you’ve done it with are popular now too. Roma, Echo, Mel. Madeleine's gotten three different invites to parties today, and she's not even in the country anymore.”

This is definitely a dream, or at least some sort of stress-induced hallucination. There’s no way Bellamy _actually_ has a magic dick, that can make girls popular.

“So you think that by saying you had sex with me, you’ll become popular,” Bellamy says, slowly, just to make sure he’s following her train of thought.

“I think that by _you_ saying you had sex with me, people might actually realize I exist,” Rita corrects, and Bellamy knows he’s going to say yes. There’s no real way to say no to that. As previously stated, he’s a sucker.

“Okay, so what’s the game plan? I take you out to dinner and then--?”

Rita shrugs. “If you want. I was thinking we just hooked up in the janitor’s closet upstairs during third period.”

“Wow,” Bellamy says. “Romance really is dead.”

Rita grins. “You’re sweet, Bellamy Blake. Thanks.” She slides him a little square envelope, like the kind that come with gift cards.

“What’s this?” He takes it, and finds it actually _is_ a gift card, to Applebee’s.

“Just a little token of appreciation,” she says, winking, like they just made some behind-the-store drug deal, or something. “Thanks again, Bellamy.”

“Sure,” he says, watching her leave. He’d be lying if he said he didn’t feel like a prostitute, but it’s not like he can really just turn down two free meals.

The news about him and Rita spreads even quicker than the story about him and Madeleine, and by the time he reaches his comp class, it seems like everybody knows. He keeps getting high fives from guys he doesn’t even know that well, and they keep calling Rita _Rory_ or _Rosa_.

He sits down beside Miller in health class, which is one of those strange subjects that Bellamy doesn’t really like, but doesn’t hate, either. He’s not a fan of all the guilt-tripping posters that examine a guy’s liver and penis in excruciating detail, just to scare people away from alcohol and sex, but he really likes documentaries. They’re halfway through the one where some guy eats nothing but McDonald’s for six months, like _that’s_ the way to prove fast food is unhealthy.

“What have you heard about my dick?” Bellamy asks, nudging Miller with his foot. Miller, for his part, looks impressively unconcerned about it.

“I heard you got the clap from girl named Rosalita,” he says, not even bothering to look up from where he’s doodling a dick, pretty lovingly. It’s got ivy vines all around it.

Bellamy makes a face. “Wow, people suck. Her name’s Rita, and she paid me twenty-five dollars in the form of an Applebee’s gift card, to say I hooked up with her.”

Miller shakes his head at his art penis. “Straight people are fucking weird.” Bellamy can’t help but agree.

The thing is--it just keeps happening.

Girls that Bellamy’s never spoken to or seen before find him in the hallways, in the back of the classroom, even one memorable time outside the men’s bathroom on the second floor. They slip ten dollar gift cards to Target and fifteen dollar gift certificates to the discount theater through the grooves of his locker, and just ask him to _play along_.

Bellamy’s getting the most action he ever has, and none of it is real.

“At what point do I stop feeling like some weird charitable hooker,” he wonders, crossing the parking lot with Lexa. It’s been two weeks since his weird sex con with her cousin, and he's not sure everything should feel as  _normal_   as it does.

“Whenever you stop accepting their pathetic attempts at payment for your hypothetical intercourse.”

Bellamy makes a face. “Why do you always say _intercourse_? There is no reason on earth valid enough for you to use that word.”

“It’s a good word,” Lexa defends, and gives one last wave before he watches her drive off, skidding around the corner of the lot on two wheels. He has to practice for the play after school, and Miller does too, so Lexa is on Octavia duty for the next couple of weeks.

Which Bellamy’s trying not to freak out about, since she is notoriously bad with kids; she likes to treat them like they’re just miniature adults, which means his sister will absolutely not be wearing her seatbelt on the ride home, and she’ll probably get Lexa to buy her iced coffee, because she’s tiny and cute and persuasive.

Even Octavia asked about his recent _dalliances_ \--in that she asked what _man-whore_ meant, because she’d heard one of her classmate’s older siblings use it, and Bellamy can put two and two together.

“It’s like one of those pots with the holes that you pour hot noodles in,” Bellamy said, and Octavia just shrugged and kept coloring.

He’ll have to sit down and have The Talk with her soon, because if he doesn’t then her teacher will, and he really doesn’t want her to be scarred for life by watching some home birth video in a class filled with pubescents.

It’s probably just another thing that their mom should be doing, but she’s not, so Bellamy’s the one who has to step up.

He’s pretty sure everyone in the county has heard about his recent exploits by now--all except for Clarke. And if she has heard, then she hasn’t given any sign of it. She’s the only person who still treats him the same, except for Lexa and Miller, and that’s only because they know the truth and like to tease him for it.

“Oh yes, your life is _so_ rough, because you’re getting tons of hypothetical pussy without having to actually put in any work for it,” Miller rolls his eyes, and Bellamy shoves him.

“Shut up, asshole.” They’re on the stage of the gymnasium, where they’ll be performing the play in less than a month. They’ve gone through their readings, and while a few people still don’t have their lines _quite_ one hundred percent, they get better everyday. Right now they’re helping the construction crew, made up of a bunch of overachievers and/or art geeks who had a free afternoon and nothing better to do.

Clarke falls into the second category.

“You’ve got some tree-bark on your face,” she says, folding herself down beside Bellamy, where he’s painting one of the plywood trees that Arthur Miller liked to describe as _villainous_.

Bellamy frowns, reaching up to graze the stubble of his jawline, feeling for paint. “What? No I don’t.”

Clarke promptly takes a brush, dips it in the can of brown paint, and swipes it across his cheek with a cheery grin. “Now you do!”

Bellamy makes a face and swipes at his skin, the back of his knuckles coming back stained a bit darker. “At least it almost blends in, on me,” he says, and brushes the back of his hand against Clarke’s cheek, so they’re matching.

They’re streaked brown and green and orange by the time Miller catches them, barking to them about deadlines, and _this is a_ serious _production, meant to be taken_ seriously _!_

Raven’s up in the metal crow’s nest, filled with wires and dials that lead to the spotlights above the stage. She keeps switching out the colored slides, and likes to bathe Miller in green when he’s angry, so he looks like the Hulk.

The play is coming along at a reasonable pace, or at least, at what Bellamy thinks is a reasonable pace, considering it’s the first play he’s ever been in. He knows at least forty-five percent of his lines by now, and is fairly confident in his ability to just wing it, should worse come to worst. Miller would probably say otherwise, but. Fuck what Miller would say. Bellamy’s never seen him more over dramatic. He’s rolled his eyes so hard and so often recently that Bellamy’s worried they might get knocked loose.

“Are you going to be in it?” he asks Clarke, who’s turned back to the plywood tree and is painting it in smooth, careful strokes. He remembers she used to draw when they were kids, and she was pretty good, but he’s seen her around the halls carrying paper mache ballet dancers and swans and paintings that resemble Monets. She’s clearly got talent. It shouldn’t seem fair, that someone like Clarke Griffin, who already has so much, should be gifted with this too. But Bellamy can’t find it in himself to begrudge her for it. She’s worked hard at it, after all.

“In what?” she hums, distracted, using the tip of her brush to make little divots in the paint, so it’s textured like actual bark.

“The play.”

Clarke looks over at him, surprised. “What? No. I’ll be in the audience though, just in case you mess up.”

“I’m totally going to choke,” he agrees, solemn, and she rolls her eyes at him.

“You won’t; I’ve seen you running lines with Miller and Harper. You’re good. You’ve got a good voice.”

Bellamy blinks. “You heard me sing?” The last time they practiced the choir was three days ago, and he doesn’t remember Clarke stopping by to help with props that day. As he watches, she starts to turn pink around the edges. It’s a good look on her.

She still has a smudge of brown on her cheek from his knuckles, and he wants to fit his thumb against the skin there, to brush the flakes away.

“I was walking to the library and overheard,” she says primly, and he knows immediately it’s a lie.

“You like my voice,” Bellamy accuses, and Clarke throws her towel--the scrap of old t-shirt they’re supposed to use to wipe up any spilled paint--at his face. He catches it easily, still grinning, even as she turns a deeper shade of red. This is the best day of his life, honestly. Clarke Griffin likes the sound of him singing, enough to hide out and listen when she thinks he doesn’t know.

“Do not,” she argues, petulant, sticking her tongue out like a child. He almost reaches out to catch it between his fingers.

“You do,” he goads, nudging her shoulder with his. “You like my singing voice, just admit it.” She stays stubbornly silent, glaring resolutely at the tree as she paints, so he leans in until his mouth is just an inch from her ear. “ _You like my voice_ ,” he sings, low, and he can’t swallow his grin when she _shudders_.

He pulls back, triumphant, and Clarke huffs.

“Maybe I do, so what? It’s just better than your regular speaking voice, that’s all,” she snaps, but it’s hard to feel offended.

“Ouch,” Bellamy grins. He’s grinning for the rest of the day, even when Clarke threatens to dump what’s left of the paint over his head.

 

“Shut up,” Lexa hisses suddenly, which seems a little strange since Bellamy wasn’t even talking; he’d been listening to her rant about the econ teacher. When he glances up from his lunch, he sees she’s staring at some girl he doesn’t recognize, across the cafeteria. She’s cute, with dark skin and curly hair. She must be a transfer, or something. He elbows Lexa in the ribs, and she bares her teeth at him like a shark.

“Why don’t you just say hi?” He waggles his eyebrows for added effect, but Lexa seems unimpressed.

“That’s Costia,” she says, still hissing, like the girl might somehow be able to hear them from a dozen yards away.

Bellamy blinks, thinking over the name for a minute, trying to place it. “Oh, shit. The girl from Arizona? Your first time?”

“ _Yes,_ ” Lexa whispers, sounding desperate, which sort of makes sense. Lexa doesn’t really know how to handle impromptu situations. She’s a battle strategist, not an improv artist.

“Okay, uh, does she know you go here?”

“I mentioned it, yes.” Her leg is shaking up and down under the table, and Bellamy puts a hand on her knee, trying to calm her down. “Do you think she came here for me?”

“That’s kind of a long drive for some girl she had sex with at summer camp three years ago,” he muses, “But I guess so, maybe. Want me to ask her?”

Lexa whips around to stare at him so quickly he’s afraid her neck might snap clean off. “What?”

“Do you want me to ask her? You know, use my words, a question mark.”

“I’m _aware_ of what a question is, Bellamy. I just…don’t know. Do you think it would be odd?”

“Yeah,” Bellamy says, since there’s no real point in lying. “But it’d be odder if you tried to sneak out of here, Mission Impossible-style. So why don’t I just go over and see if I can find anything out?”

Lexa studies him, suddenly looking suspicious. “You aren’t going to seduce her, are you?”

“What? No--you’re the one who gets the bedroom eyes out whenever you see a pretty girl. I’m just trying to help.”

She seems to believe him--which she should, because it’s true--and nods. “Fine, then. I suppose you could ask what she’s doing here.”

Bellamy pushes his tray back and stands. “How about I just start with hi.”

Costia is even prettier up close, and Bellamy hopes for Lexa’s sake, that she really did come here for her, or at least with her in mind. It’d be so awkward if she didn’t even remember the pretty brunette she fell for, three summers ago.

“Hey,” Bellamy says, sliding onto the bench seat beside her. She’s reading some old, bent-up paperback, and she sets it down with a confused look. “I’m Bellamy. Uh, this might be weird, but my best friend says she knows you.”

He gestures to where Lexa is sitting, pretending not to stare, and Costia turns to look over her shoulder. Her eyes light up with recognition, and Bellamy breathes a sigh of relief. “Lexa’s your best friend?” She turns back around and eyes him up and down. “Lexa said you were short.”

“I had a growth spurt,” he huffs, because of course she’d tell her that. Back when she was taller than him, Lexa liked to remind everyone of that fact, whenever she was able. Now he stands almost half a foot above her, and she’s not happy about it.

“Did Lexa send you over?” Costia asks, sounding amused.

“If I say yes, will you go talk to her?”

She grins, picking up her tray in one hand and her book in the other. “All she had to do was ask,” she rolls her eyes, but she seems fond about it, for all that she hasn’t actually _seen_ Lexa in three years. Bellamy gets it; Gina Martin graduated a couple of years ahead of them, but if he saw her again, he’d probably feel pretty nostalgic, and want to catch up.

He watches Costia fold herself up beside Lexa, close enough that their sides are touching. She seems bright and happy, while Lexa’s clearly growing shy, and Bellamy shoots her an obnoxious wink on his way out of the cafeteria.

Bellamy shows up fifteen minutes early to his accounting class, and finds Murphy sitting back in one of the desk chairs, with his feet propped up on the table as he scribbles in the margins of his textbook with a permanent marker.

Bellamy hasn’t actually spoken to Murphy in close to a year and a half, since they were freshmen and went through a particularly hellish semester of weight training together, the sort of experience that forces students to bond.

“So I heard you’re a gigolo now,” Murphy says, in place of hello, and Bellamy suddenly remembers why he stopped talking to him.

“Yep, that’s me,” Bellamy grunts, pulling out his assignment. He only has two more classes until the end of the day, and then he gets to head to the gym-slash-theater, where he’ll see Clarke. He might ask her to run lines with him, sitting on stage with their legs dangling over the edge, her thigh pressed against his and warm through the denim of his jeans--or they might fuck around with the props, tightening pulleys and painting fake rocks with little torn-up sponges dipped in gray paint. Either way, it’s his favorite time of day.

English is his last class, but he’s surprised to find a note on the door stating that Ms. Tsing is out for the day, and her students are supposed to report to Mr. Theel down the hall.

He shows up to find that not only is Murphy also in this class, but sitting right beside him is Clarke Griffin. She glances up when Bellamy walks in, smiles prettily and waves him over, towards the open seat on her other side. At the other end of the table is Lexa, already glowering like a cat that’s been displaced. Lexa doesn’t like sudden changes in routine.

“Hey,” he nods to Clarke, sitting down in the chair once she’s moved her sweater from it. “Thanks for saving me a seat.”

“Of course,” she shrugs, like it’s obvious. Of course she saved him a seat. Like there wasn’t ever any doubt.

Bellamy has to lean all the way across the table to catch Lexa’s eye. “How’d it go with Costia?”

“She is well,” Lexa says primly. “Her father had a job transfer to the city, which is why they moved her. Her mother preferred this school district.”

“So she’s not a stalker, that’s good to know,” Bellamy chirps, and she glowers. He leans back before she can try to throw an eraser or something at his face.

“Who’s Costia?” asks Clarke. Bellamy glances at Lexa, to make sure it’s okay, before answering.

“One of Lexa’s old friends from Jesus Camp.” He’d almost forgotten Murphy was even _there_ , but then he snorts.

“ _Friend_ ,” he drawls, “Right.” Bellamy sort of wants to punch him. He just has a very punchable face.

“Alright, class,” Mr. Theel calls. Mr. Theel always sort of reminds Bellamy of that Disney movie, _101 Dalmatians_. There’s a scene, where all the dog owners look like human versions of their dogs, and Bellamy never really got that until he saw Mr. Theel for the first time. He’s a short, squat man, who looks exactly like an English bulldog. There’s simply no better way to describe him.

“I know this is not an ideal arrangement,” he continues. “But we’ll just have to make due. Now, I believe we are all working on the same story-- _A Scarlet Letter_ \--so how about we start there?”

Graham throws his fist in the air, from where he’s sitting up front, which seems a little strange. Bellamy wouldn’t have placed Graham for a first-question-in-class kind of guy. “What’s the difference between a female whore and a male one?” he asks, and Bellamy’s stomach clenches automatically.

Mr. Theel looks a little thrown. “Do you mean, why does Hester have to wear the scarlet letter, but not Dimmesdale?”

“Yeah,” Graham agrees, turning to sneer back at Bellamy, completely obvious. Bellamy can feel his face starting to heat up, his skin burning. “I mean, shouldn’t _all_ hookers be treated the same?”

Lexa looks like she’s ready to stab her ballpoint pen into his jugular; she watched a self defense video on Youtube called “10 Ways To Kill Someone With A BIC Pen,” and has carried one on her at all times, ever since.

“You mean, with respect and human decency?” Clarke snaps, and Bellamy turns to find her on the edge of her seat, like she’s ready to leap over their table and brawl it out with Graham, herself.

“I mean, if your job is sex, it’s probably not that great, right?” Graham continues, like she didn’t even speak. Mr. Theel is looking more and more uncomfortable with the direction the conversation is taking.

“Funny, your mom didn’t seem to think so last night,” Bellamy says, because he’s not actually very creative when it comes down to it. But the line seems to do its job, because Graham’s smirk is replaced by a glower.

“Maybe you should put a red A on all of your clothes,” he spits out.

“Maybe I will,” Bellamy snaps back, and Mr. Theel knocks a hand against his wooden desk, like a judge who’s forgotten his mallet.

“Alright, uh, let’s settle down now,” he tries, and honestly he’s lucky they’re a fairly mild-mannered bunch, Bellamy and Graham notwithstanding.

Bellamy doesn’t actually realize he’s still buzzing with anger until Clarke slips her hand, cool and small, into his, lacing their fingers together and giving a squeeze. He glances up and over, and finds her looking down at her open book.

Graham doesn’t start anything again for the rest of the class, but Clarke doesn’t let go of his hand until the bell rings.

Bellamy’s on his way to the gym for play practice, after seeing Lexa off, when Graham steps out as he rounds the corner of the building.

They’re around the back, with the dumpsters and dilapidated computer chairs with busted levers or missing wheels. No one else is around, and the walls are thick and windowless, so no one inside will hear them.

“Graham,” Bellamy starts, trying to loosen up for the fight that’s about to happen. “This is a bad idea.”

“You got me pretty good that day in the stairwell,” Graham sneers, and Bellamy knows there’s no talking him down. “Seems to me like I owe you one.”

Honestly, Bellamy’s feeling pretty good about his odds--it’s not like he hasn’t ever fought anyone before, and he _did_ win against Graham, the last time--and then Graham pulls out the metal pipe from behind his back, swinging it like a baseball bat.

“Seriously,” Bellamy says, and tries to duck. There’s a _crack_ like thunder that shakes him to the core, and a dull throbbing erupting in the side of his skull, and then everything fades around him, until there’s nothing left.

Bellamy wakes to somebody calling his name, prodding his shoulder back and forth wildly, only stopping when he starts to groan. The ache in his head is still there, still throbbing, and he has to squint to see, eyes watering from the effort. The person helps him sit up, supporting him with one bony shoulder digging into his side.

“Thank fucking god,” Clarke says. “Can you stand? Should I call an ambulance? Should I call your mom?”

Bellamy shakes his head, which only makes the pain worse. Clarke’s cool fingers prob around through his hair, feeling for injuries. She touches an especially tender spot and he winces, so her fingers go from poking and dancing to massaging the pain away. “Ambulance is too expensive,” he says. “Mom’s at work, can’t be disturbed. I just need,” he hesitates, unsure how to ask. When they were kids, Clarke didn’t seem to have any problems with his shithole of a house, and his craggy scarred-up neighborhood. But they’re older now, and things are different. She might see things differently. See _him_ differently.

“What?” she presses, helping him stand up completely. It’s slow-going, and she still has to pull his arm over her shoulders, for support. “What do you need, Bellamy?”

He swallows, and just lets the words fall out. “A ride home,” he sighs. “Can you--I need a ride home.”

“Sure,” Clarke says, and Bellamy can barely make out her features through the swelling of his eye, but he’s pretty sure she’s smiling. “I can do that. Come on.” She readjusts underneath him, so she can take more of his weight, and they walk slowly towards her car.

“Did I miss practice?”

“Only about fifteen minutes,” she props him up against the hood while she unlocks his door, and then she shuffles him into the front seat. “I got worried, so I came outside to check around. I thought maybe you got locked out, or something.”

“It was Graham,” Bellamy sighs, and Clarke swears, more vulgar than he’s used to from her. The sound of it makes him grin, lip splitting from a cut he didn’t know he had. Blood trickles down his chin. “He had a tire iron, or something like one.”

“What the fuck,” Clarke says, revving the engine. “You’re going to have to tell me where to turn. I’m shitty with directions.”

“Okay,” he agrees, even though he still can’t really see. But he’s known these streets his whole life, now. He can get them home.

It’s strange, driving in silence. He’s so used to the deafening noise of Lexa’s music, or Miller’s NPR. But Clarke doesn’t even reach to turn the stereo on, or hook up her phone to a USB cord.

Bellamy directs her down the back roads, the unpaved gravel and dirt ones that send clouds of gray and dusty brown up all around them as they go. They pass little square houses like gift boxes, lined up in rows along the streets. They pass cemeteries with crooked headstones like crooked teeth gnawing at the earth.

Finally Bellamy has her pull up to the outlook point, the secluded hill that looks out over the whole town, so they can see everything for miles. Clarke puts the car in park with a hum.

“I don’t remember your house looking like this,” she says, and Bellamy gives a hoarse laugh, throat still raw from being unconscious.

“I don’t want O to see me like this,” he admits. “I want to wait until the swelling dies down, a little.”

Clarke makes a noise of understanding, and he hears her unbuckle her seat belt and readjust her seat, like she’s getting comfortable.

But then she opens up her door and says “The view’s probably better from the hood,” and he can’t really say no to that.

The metal just above the engine is still warm when they slide up, and the car is small, so their legs are touching, hipbone to ankle. They lay back against the windshield in silence, watching the sky go from soft orange to sharp pink to twilight purple.

“Why aren’t we friends anymore?” Clarke asks, after fifteen minutes of silence, and Bellamy doesn’t know how to answer.

“We are friends,” he says, finally, and she huffs.

“But not like we used to be. Not like we could have been, if we hadn’t _stopped_. Why did we stop?”

Bellamy shrugs one shoulder, the one that aches the least from when he hit the ground. “We went to different schools. We didn’t see each other anymore. And then when we got to high school, I don’t know. We didn’t run in the same circles.”

Clarke goes quiet and for a moment he’s worried he’s hurt her feelings. “I don’t really have a circle,” she says, like a confession, and Bellamy snorts.

“Yeah, you have an ocean, more like.”

“No,” she sighs. “I have a lot of acquaintances. People who like me. But no one who _knows_ me. Not like you did.” She turns to look at him, silhouetted in the shadows of dusk. “Not like you do.”

“Why don’t you ask me?” Bellamy asks, and just barely sees the crooked glimpse of Clarke’s frown, like she’s confused. “Everyone’s talking about me. You must have heard the rumors. Why don’t you ask me if they’re true?” He doesn’t bother adding that everyone else has; she probably already knows.

There’s a flash of white, her teeth when she smiles. “Bellamy, when we were twelve years old and I wasn’t ready to kiss anyone yet, I lied and told everyone we did.”

He finds her hand in the dark, like when she’d found his in the classroom, and knots them together between their stomachs. He thought there was no way she’d remember that night. “You know me too,” he says. “You still know me.”

Clarke leans in until the tip of her nose grazes the skin of his cheek, and Bellamy winces when she touches the bruise there. He moves so that his lips are just barely grazing her chin, so that they’re close enough to share air, but none of her is touching any of the tender starbursts across his face.

“If my face didn’t feel like a punching bag, I’d kiss you right now,” he admits, and she laughs.

“I’d kiss you back.”

They lay there for a moment, just grinning and touching in the dark. “Who was your first kiss, anyway,” he wonders, curious.

“Oh, I thought you knew. It was Lexa.”

Bellamy’s mouth drops open without his permission. “ _Lexa_ ?” he echoes, disbelieving. “That _ass_ \--she knew how I feel about you.”

“How you feel about me?”

Bellamy feels her fingers drift up the skin of his arm, and he shivers. “You know how I feel about you too,” he accuses. “Stop fishing.”

“I know you want to kiss me,” Clarke says, smile in her voice.

“I want to do a lot more than kiss you. I want to take you to dinner, or a movie, or Prom. _And_ I want to kiss you.”

Clarke smacks a kiss to the back of his hand, before sliding down from the hood. It’s been nearly an hour, and Bellamy can almost completely open his eyes. “All of that sounds perfectly doable,” she chirps. “Now, where do I turn?”

 

Lexa gets Graham expelled. Bellamy isn’t sure how she does it, let alone how she manages to do it in less than a single _day_ , but by the end of the next afternoon, Graham is gone, his locker is cleared out, and there’s a rumor floating around involving Mt. Weather, the juvenile hall upstate.

“Don’t worry about it,” she says when Bellamy asks her at lunch. "Just consider us even, now." Costia’s curled up as close as she can possibly get without literally sitting in Lexa’s lap, and they both seem content to just stare into each other’s eyes for forty minutes, eating nothing but their own sappiness. Bellamy just makes a face and goes to eat with Clarke.

He's given up trying to figure out what the bet was about--he's decided he'll just never know. At this point, he's not really sure he even wants to.

They finish up the play’s set that afternoon, painting the last of the fake roses and setting them out on an old stained tablecloth, to dry. Bellamy dips his brush in the leftover paint and reaches up to paste a capital A on his left cheek, grinning when Clarke makes a face at it.

“What? I thought it was funny.”

He said no for the first time that day, to a girl named Charlotte who wanted to tell everyone she went down on him in the locker room. It felt a little awkward, and even worse when she almost cried, but Bellamy doesn’t really feel comfortable letting rumors of his promiscuity fly around while he’s dating someone--no matter how untrue they are.

“You’re like a weird, sexual saint,” Clarke muses, when he tells her. “But like, it’s imaginary sex, which is even more saintly, to be honest.”

“Not anymore I’m not,” Bellamy says, wrapping an arm around her. He’s still getting used to it, the fact that he can _do this_ now. The fact that he has Clarke Griffin tucked into his side, all warm and soft and happy. “There’s only one girl I’m having imaginary sex with, from now on.”

“I mean, hopefully it won’t be _imaginary_ ,” Clarke says, and Bellamy nearly walks into a fake wall.

Opening night comes, and he doesn’t choke, but he does forget his lines twice, and barely manage to correct himself. Also one of the prop doors rolls away down the stage, but he didn’t even work on that one so he’s not taking the blame for it.

All in all, it goes over fairly well, and Bellamy gets to bow and feel important at the end, which is nice.

Clarke’s waiting for him with a bouquet of flowers in the lobby, when he’s done, with Lexa and Costia and O. She smacks a kiss to his cheek while his sister makes fake gagging noises.

“You were okay,” she says, giving a half-shrug, and Bellamy shakes his head.

“We both know you _really liked it_ ,” he sings the last part, drawing it out until she shoves him in the arm so he laughs.

“You were perfectly adequate,” Lexa says, which is as close to a compliment as he’ll get from her, so he takes it.

“Okay, but that was just the opening night,” he points out, as they start off across the parking lot. Lexa puts her jacket over Costia’s shoulders, and Clarke folds her fingers through his.

“It can only get better, from here.”


End file.
